In general, a process model describes activities conducted (i.e. activity-centric) in order to achieve business goals, informational structures, and organizational resources.
Recent engineering and development efforts have adopted the artifact approach for design and analysis of business models.
[6][7] Van der Aalst et al.[6] provides a case-handling approach where a process is driven by the presence of data objects instead of control flows.
Wang and Kumar[7] proposed the document-driven workflow systems which is designed based on data dependencies without the need for explicit control flows.
The approach reduces modelling efforts significantly and provides mechanisms for maintaining data-driven process structures.
[12][13][14][15] Gerede and Su[12] developed a specification language ABSL to specify artifact behaviours in artifact-centric process models.
The authors showed decidability results of their language for different cases and provided key insights on how artifact-centric view can affect the specification of desirable business properties.
The work is among the important initial steps along the path towards eventual support for tools that enable substantial automation for workflow design, analysis, and modification.
The problem of automatic verification of artifact systems, with the goal of increasing confidence in the correctness of such business processes is also studied.